Can we get a drumroll going, please?
One month and more than 13,000 votes later, BostInno is ready to crown this year's Inno Madness champion.
First, let’s take a quick look at how we got here. We kicked off Inno Madness on March 3 with 64 Boston-area companies considered movers and shakers in their respective industries. The bracket — assembled by BostInno's editorial team based on nominations you sent in over the course of several weeks — encompassed a broad range of private, venture capital-backed or bootstrapped firms, all of them new ventures at the earliest stages as well as some established favorites.
For a behind-the-scenes tour of this year's Inno Madness winner at work, scroll through the gallery above.
Brackets were competitive from the first round. AtScale beat out USEFULL by just 12 votes, and DocFox inched ahead of BitSight by 10 votes. We saw upsets as well, with the recently launched startup Significard beating Inari, a biotech company with $352 million in funding. Never consider yourself safe in this competition.
There were some clear winners in the second round of voting, including Embark Veterinary and Armored Things. For the first and only time of this competition, we needed a one-day, tie-breaking vote to choose a winner between ezCater and Allure Security Technologies Inc.
AtScale led the third round with the most points, with Embark Veterinary, DocFox and Allego following behind. Smile and its dating app lost to Realtime Robotics. Paragonix Technologies Inc. beat out ezCater.
And then there were four: Realtime Robotics, DocFox, Allego and Breakout Fun! Despite a close vote in the semifinals, it was Realtime Robotics and DocFox who captured the most reader votes and moved into the finals.
This year’s champion participated in Inno Madness (formerly Tech Madness) for the first time last year. The startup lost in the first round to Luminoso. This year’s victory is a comeback story.
Realtime Robotics secured the 2022 Inno Madness crown with nearly 80% of the votes.
“Our whole team got really fired up this year. There was a huge buzz in Slack,” George Konidaris, co-founder and chief technology officer of Realtime Robotics, told BostInno. “It was kind of fun, but certainly nerve wracking to watch. There was a lot of 'wake up in the morning and check where you are' moments.”
Realtime Robotics is a Boston-based company that creates collision-free motion plans for industrial robots and autonomous vehicles. Its software allows robots to function in unstructured environments and respond to changes in their workspaces. Konidaris said the software can be connected to all different kinds of robots, but the company is targeting automotive manufacturing to start.
The company was founded five years ago, Konidaris said, and has since grown to 75 employees and raised around $30 million in venture capital. Realtime Robotics has also opened offices in the automotive hubs of Berlin, Japan and Brazil. The staff in these locations are mainly applications engineers who visit factories and implement the company’s technology.
“We sell a sort of control box that controls robots,” Konidaris said. “We have sold a bunch of these boxes. They’re mostly at the moment being used in R&D. So, we’re at the sort of stage where large companies are proving the technology.”
Konidaris said the company was working last year on the second version of its product, which was partly to blame for its early loss in the 2021 Tech Madness bracket. He said employees didn’t have much time to engage in the competition as they pushed toward major milestones. This year, the team got caught up in the action.
“You could almost break out the popcorn. It’s like watching the Olympics or something like that, everyone was very excited,” Konidaris said of the company’s Slack chatter during each round of voting.
Konidaris thinks the team’s engagement with the competition really gave them a boost through the first few rounds. The company also raised a Series A round last summer and redesigned its website, which might have helped it stand out. Plus, they work with robots, Konidaris said. Who doesn’t think that’s cool?
“We have this unique solution to this really hard technological problem,” Konidaris said. “We’re kind of able to access things and able to generate applications that no one else can offer. I feel that we’re unique and weird for that reason. But I enjoy it. It feels appropriately Boston. This is not a place where we staple things together. This is where true technical innovation happens.”
